Lesson 9 -- History and Genealogy Resources—Ancestry Library, Heritage Quest and Sanborn Maps

I do not exist in Ancestry Library. There was a mix up when my mother died and our identities were basically combined. I did find my mother and her record appears to be correct. As I was searching for my mother I came across several of her family members. It was interesting to see about them as I never met many of them. By doing a keyword search on South Dakota I got 3,615,253 hits, I think I did it right but not sure. It asked for more info to more define the search, which with that many hits is understandable. I didn't find the site very easy to use, even having specific information on a person there were multiple hits that came up that I had to look through to find who I was looking for.

Lesson 8--ArchiveGrid and CAMIO

ArchiveGrid: I find it very sad that Sitting Bull was killed for following his traditions. I would have liked to have seen an image of the autograph included with the description. If there was a link to it I did not see it. For my own search I looked up Seth Bullock and came up with 8 hits. One was a diary held by the Montana Historical Society. I never knew that Seth was a Canadian or that he and President Theodore Roosevelt were good friends. It's a good resource for finding out where to look for information on a subject and that it gives you the contact information to the institution is nice. Not really suited for younger patrons, but grad students could find it useful. I realize most people would rather be able to have complete access to materials but that's not always possible.





CAMIO: I love the silver work of Paul Revere! Beautiful. Makes me want to travel to Boston to see it. When searching for "Sioux" there were 63 results, with work types ranging from paintings to sculpture to jewelry. Since I don't really have a favorite artist, I searched for a couple from SD, Jon Crane and Terry Redlin. Needless to say, I didn't get any hits on them ;). I can see art students using this site to compare one artist to another or one movement to another. I did a search on snow (since I'm watching it fall at the moment). If I was doing a paper on this topic it was easy to narrow down my results and put them together into one spot so I would be able to study them at a later date and compare them.

I'm giving CAMIO a thumbs up. It's fun to have a place to go to look at art when you live so far from art galleries. It would be nicer though if you were able to access the site from home. :)

Lesson 7 - WorldCat

I used WorldCat at my previous job when helping out with ILL. I knew there were all kinds of applications it could be used for but didn't realize how you could follow a thread from one title (Skippyjon Jones, who I love and adore) all the way to Hurricane Katrina stories. One could lose track of what it was you were researching if you're not careful (this is not always a bad thing). I'm not totally in love with the site but can see it's usefulness within the library world, although I'm not sure how it would be useful to someone who isn't associated with libraries. When searching in OAIster for South Dakota I paged through and came across several old pictures of Deadwood, Bear Butte and the surrounding areas. What I found very interesting was that all the ones I looked at were held by the Denver Public Library, not more local libraries. I guess by doing this excercise I have the knowledge to direct people here if looking for old photos, so therefore it could be helpful to others in the outside world ;)

Lesson 6 - EBooks on EbscoHost

I did several different searches on a wide variety of topics just to get a feel for the site. By using the advanced settings you can really narrow your searches. The basic search is nice if you have a topic but not sure where you specifically want to go. I am always amused when searching sites, any site, not just this one, and you can do search for dog breeds and get books on psychology. Makes me want to read that book to see how it relates to dogs :) Anyway...

I found these 3 books about the constitution. I don't remember celebrating Constitution Day as a youngster, but possible it is so far in the past I forgot.

Our Elusive Constitution : Silences, Paradoxes, Priorities
Hoffman, Daniel N.
State University of New York Press, 1997

Representing Popular Sovereignty : The Constitution in American Political Culture
Levin, Daniel Lessard
State University of New York Press, 1999

The American Republic : Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
Brownson, Orestes Augustus
Project Gutenberg

With the Western History search I added South Dakota as it would make sense since this is where I live. I didn't find any books published in SD but did find some books about SD. I could have been searching wrong and there were some published in SD and I just missed them.

Lesson 5 - Gale Virtual Reference Library

Lots of great resource materials here. Easy to use whether you know what you want to search for or if you browse the titles list to find what you might be looking for. Within the articles you can search related topics and links, limit the search to which volume or edition to what fits your criteria. What is the best part I think is that you can email the article to yourself, or print it, listen to it, download to an MP3. How awesome is that??? And ever present is the all important citation help. Where was that when I was in school? I just did a few basic searches within different titles to see how they looked, then did a search on zinc. Thinking you might not want to have such a broad topic :) I looked through several articles on different areas of zinc and found out several interesting things that I had not known about it.

One question I do have is how often are the titles updated? Does it happen automatically if a newer edition comes out? I noticed one of the titles was from 1999. I realize many things don't change, but the Endangered Species is from 2004 and I would have to think that there are some changes there. Do you have any information on this? Thanks!!

Lesson 4 - ProQuest

I did a basic search on synthetic drugs since it seems to be a big topic in SD at the moment. There are several articles on this topic. The majority of articles look like they come from scholarly and trade journals which are great for higher education students but there didn't seem to be much for younger students. At least not that I saw from my search. I liked that you can narrow your search by article type, publication, classification, ect. One obstacle with the site is trying to explain to patrons that, no, this isn't an internet site and you can use the articles as a source.

The publications portion is great! Who knew you could look up complete journals online??? If a patron comes in and remembers some article from june of 2004 in, say newsweek, you can show them this site and they can find it quite easily. Or, if a colleague mentions a great review they read in Booklist, you can search from the comfort of your chair, not having to dig through old paper issues.

SIRS

This exercise a little difficult for me to complete and I struggled with it. The site seems like it would be quite helpful in an academic setting where the librarians are aware of such things as Lexile measures (I had not heard of them before so I spent time reading about them, which was a good exercise). When just doing a search on a broad topic the amount of articles that came up was immense. Once I figured out that people would have a more focused topic than me just picking a broad topic, it would greatly dwindle the articles. There were things I did like about the site, like being able to sort between newspaper and magazine articles. Having the citations at the bottom is helpful and also links to other articles is useful. I will continue to work with the site to get a better feel for it. The fact that I don’t care for it won’t keep me from telling people about it, it is just my opinion after all.